2012-09-26

Figured the more episodes are in the wild, the easier it'll be to seed, so since the first disc's worth are done here they are.

None of these have been resized to 720x480 the way all the DVD5 sourced episodes were, as that would just hard code a slight blur into the files, and these discs are so much better looking than the shitty recompressed versions that we did not wish to impart such. Granted, if you fullscreen the playback, your player will probably use a worse scaler than avisynth's spline36() or blackman(), but at least the source itself (which you may wish to make screencaps of) will be pure. They all expand to 16:9 just like the other ones anyway, even if it's not the same dimensions to reach that ratio. Also, the files are given a higher bitrate encode, so they're slightly larger than average, though still smaller than the hilarious episode 42.

Also, in case you haven't actually noticed at any point, the track title for the video track in these muxes contains the episode title. It did in the original 1-10 too, which is why we decided putting it in the filename was stupid and redundant, but at least this way you can access that information at all, since Rider shows started hiding those titles for a while after Kuuga.

2012-09-20

The HD versions are segmented 7-zip archives, because they're too big for Packupload. Heck, the 1080p is 7.3GB so it's too big for pretty much anything.

Both HD versions are 10bit encodes. The 1080p is completely unfiltered, just a minor crop off the sides of some junk data, so it's not perfectly 1920x1080, as that kind of tiny horizontal scale would just blur things for no good reason. It's basically a straight recompress of the source, using tech that allows better compression/quality than the disc was allowed to in the first place.

The smaller two are hit with a fairly light dfttest and use 16bit resizers to give the 10bit encoder some real 10bit data to work with, as there's no real point in preserving the exact grains if you're going to be shrinking them anyway.

And with that, it's probably high time we get back to finalizing 1-12 with the new video, and swapping out the song/styles on the older episodes that we might finally have a batch.

2012-09-18

That's a lot of bling on that title screen isn't it? Why you ask? Because this special is aggressively terrible, (to the point that it was responsible for a large part of the delay that preceded the recent sprint to the finish line), and serves little purpose except getting the general public up to speed to see Project G4. Silly typesetting crap like that, including title that is already translated to English right there (which is why it's never subbed in the episodes) was a defense mechanism; a way to keep sane.

This episode is stupid. We do not recommend watching it. It contradicts the series in a large way, but not in a way that makes the story held within any better, and it introduces a new character that should be more important than he winds up. A character with a tedious speech tic to boot.

It's done though, so you can watch it if you're so inclined.

The original plan, by the way, was that Project G4 would just be a mux against the old Tokuraws encode, but there are some issues with that so we obtained the BD and have a 1080p, 720p, and 480p encode on the way. The big two are done already even, though distribution will be a nuisance (the 1080p is 7.3gb).

Thanks to the kindness of strangers (to you people, we know who), discs 1-3 DVD9 are available, so episodes 1-12 will be getting fresh encodes from better source (11-12 having already at least been done 480p h.264, but from a bad source).

You didn't think we'd die off just because we finally finished the series proper, did you?